Ever wondered what would happen if your fancy DJI Phantom drone got struck by lightning while you were out flying it? Well, wonder no more. Thanks to YouTuber Tom Scott and the University of Manchester High Voltage Lab, we can watch it happen... twice.
My name is Alex Brock, and I'm a photo enthusiast living in South Florida. I spent many nights last summer chasing storms through swamps and along the beach attempting to learn to shoot lightning, and I'd like to share some things I learned to help others who are starting out.
Lightning is an amazing subject to try and photograph. Dazzling. Unpredictable. Fulfilling. I’ve been documenting the long arm of Zeus for more than two decades and still love it. First using transparencies and negatives, then digital. There are many ways to be creative when it comes to photographing lightning.
For years, airline pilots have reported seeing unusual lightning phenomenon that we don't get to witness from the ground. Luckily for us, astronauts on the International Space Station have a perfect vantage point, and one of them did capture "blue lightning" while orbiting the Earth.
Photographer Ron Risman has created a video that he calls "The Most Spectacular 2.5 Minutes of Lightning." It shows a powerful lightning storm in Kansas synchronized with music.
Have you ever looked out the window of a plane and imagined you were surfing the clouds? Red Bull Air Force member Sean MacCormac took it one step further by skysurfing the edge of a Florida thunderstorm on my most recent assignment, titled "Storm's Edge."
Photographer Matt Taylor was shooting with the 4K photo mode on his Panasonic Lumix G7 on a recent evening when a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky off camera. Taylor's resulting photos show how much the bright flash from a lightning can illuminate a nighttime scene.
It's not 7,207fps to be sure, but this hand-held slow motion iPhone video of lightning lighting up the sky above Ashburn, Virgina is still really cool—all the more so for how accessible shooting slow motion footage like this has become.
Lightning strikes are usually so brief that their tiny details aren't noticed by the human eye. Capture lightning at 7,000 frames per second, however, and all kinds of crazy details emerge. That's what you'll see in the 45-second video above.
A massive thunderstorm over Dubai was recently captured in super slow motion at 1977 frames per second.
My name name is Rustam Azmi, and I'm a photographer based in Dubai. I recently captured this photo of lightning striking the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest skyscraper. In this post I'll share a little about how the shot was made.
Tucson, Arizona-based photography enthusiast Greg McCown recently managed to capture a shot of a lifetime. While shooting landscapes near the small town of Marana, Arizona, McCown snapped this beautiful photo showing both a lightning bolt and a rainbow in the sky.
"After years of trying I finally got my lightning and rainbow picture," McCown writes.
If you can carve a couple of hours out of your day, you should watch the film "Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning." It's a 2-hour-long documentary by PBS about the life and work of photographer Dorothea Lange, who created the iconic Migrant Mother photo back in 1936 during the Great Depression.
Photographer Evan Halleck was visiting the Grand Canyon recently when he saw a storm brewing in the distance. He drove up to it, set up his camera for a time-lapse sequence, and ended up capturing some incredible images of a thunderstorm pouring rain and lightning into the canyon.
A violet ray is an antique electrotherapy medical device invented by Nikola Tesla that's essentially a portable tesla coil. Altdorf, Germany-based photographer Marc Simon Frei purchased a unit from 1920 on eBay and customized it for experiments with photographing electricity at home.
Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.
The Canon 7D Mark II is an enigma. One day we're hearing about how its weather sealing is second to none, the next about how the sensor's performance at base and low ISO is on par with Nikon... 5 years ago, and now we swing back to the other side of the spectrum with this impressive demonstration of the camera's lightning quick AF system.
First things first: the photo above isn't a composite. In fact, as Elizabeth van der Bij of ENV Photography jokingly explained in the comments on her Facebook page, her Photoshop skills "suck", so she couldn't have faked it even if she had wanted to.
No, the Alberta-based photographer and the couple, Kassandra & Craig, simply stuck it out and kept taking pictures as the storm approached until, as luck would have it, the Universe delivered in a big way.
Now there's a family portrait you don't see every day. Photographer Kelly DeLay captured the photo above showing himself and his family standing in front of a gigantic supercell at sunset with a large lightning strike illuminating the horizon.
Some contend that there are no fireworks shows that can best mother nature's display during an intense thunderstorm, and the video above by Chicago-based videographer Craig Shimala goes a long way in confirming their belief.
If it ever was a secret, it sure isn't anymore: we LOVE photos from space. And judging by the response we typically get to sharing them, so do you, which is why we were so excited when we stumbled across these magnificent images of lightning NASA released just a couple of days ago.
Michael Shainblum captured this perfectly timed (call it luck if you want, but luck favors the prepared, so we're going with perfectly timed) shot of lightning striking the Burj Khalifa during a storm on Wednesday of last week.
We've featured some amazing instances of lightning strikes being caught on camera in the past, but none quite like this. The video above is security camera footage that shows what it's like to have a bolt of lightning strike the ground just a hop, skip, and a jump away.
I took this picture with one of five remote-controlled cameras I’d set up by the side of the track to capture the race winner from various angles and perspectives. Of course, I didn’t know for sure who’d win, but when I was setting up the gear it seemed like a fair bet to focus on Usain Bolt’s lane!
Hey aspiring storm chasers -- want to dramatically improve your lightning shots? Try getting an elevated view. Like about 400 miles up. That's the approximate orbital height above Earth of the International Space Station, which is producing an impressive library of images showing what lightning looks like from way above.
Yesterday we shared a beautiful photo showing 4th of July fireworks overlaid on a flash of lightning. After seeing that image, photographer Delilah Carter of DC Photography got in touch with us to say that she had also captured fireworks and lightning together this past weekend.
Some people have all the luck right? The above photo was taken by photographer Jason Smith, and it's a great example of the right place meeting the right time. While taking 4th of July photos at a friend's house, he was able to capture a lightning strike that synched perfectly with some fireworks.
This incredible photo of a lightning strike at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was shot by photo and videographer Travis Roe in July of 2012. A spectacular capture by a photog who has been shooting lightning since he was a teenager, the most surprising thing about this photo is that it went viral only after it somehow didn't even place in the National Parks Service 2012 photo contest.
According to the Encyclopedia of World Climatology, lightning happens about 40–50 times per second worldwide; that translates into almost 1.4 billion flashes per year. But of the 1.4 billion that happen in 2011, we're pretty sure this was the only one captured at 11,000 frames per second, turning a one second lightning flash into an incredible 6 minute experience.
Here’s a wedding photographer who probably wishes now that he had set up a second camera with a lightning …